It has a lot to do with “right”. Like, really, everything. Right wing. You see this, don’t you? It is plainly obvious to any impartial, or even a partial observer. The right wing in America, it’s a damn shame 50 years ago let alone today.
I wondering if there will be a GOP contingent of counter-protesters at the next rally. Or better yet, Trump supporters waving banners like “NOT IN MY NAME” or “REAL TRUMP SUPPORTERS HATE RACISM.”
When I start seeing stuff like that, that’s when I’ll stop lumping all Trump supporters in with the white nationalists. The more apologia and defensiveness I hear from them, the more they convince me they are modern-day versions of the brownshirts.
A while ago, I asked John Mace this question:
You jumped in with this reply:
(BTW, that’s not in any way / shape / form a complaint about you jumping in, I rather like hearing your thoughts on subjects)
My overall sense is that white supremacists / neo-nazis are a tiny fringe movement of extremists that have no real political power, don’t command any real influence (except for perhaps the hysteria their rallies tend to inspire on the Left and in the media) and are generally not worth the undue amount of attention they receive. I gather from the first post I quoted above, and your earlier post in response to my question to John Mace, that you do see them as significant / a power to be reckoned with / influential. Could you help me understand why that is? Is there some political goal that you fear they are on the cusp of achieving? Are you worried there’s some massive terrorist plot brewing amongst them that’s going to result in thousands of deaths? Are you worried they’re going to overthrow our Constitutional government? Is it just based off the political power they held decades ago? Something else?
If simply asserting that Muslims aren’t condemning Islamic based terrorism thus justifying lumping them all together is good enough for conservatives, so should assertions about Trump and Nazis.
Did you think it was a sufficient basis when conservatives did it? If so, then at least you’d be consistent if you condemned all Trump supporters for inadequately-condemning Nazis.
And, of course, the deceased was the most important person in the world to at least one other person.
Beyond infiltrating the highest levels of government and gaining direct access to, tacit approval from, and quite possibly influence over the President of the United States?
Gotta give you that one, Hurc; it’s hard to imagine what greater political goal white supremacists could achieve.
…the fuck, dude?
My moral relativism comment was in response to your Portland, Seattle and Berkley post. I fucking quoted it for clarity, FFS.
You show me when Stalin and Mao were on the west coast and then I’ll have a reason to respond to you further.
My sense is that white supremacists and neo-nazis have been mostly dormant for decades because they saw culture and society against them. I don’t think there are a great majority of such assholes out there – rather a significant minority. I don’t know exactly how many, but I think a reasonable estimate at the “floor” of how many Americans hold white supremacist views is around 3% – that’s the percentage of Louisiana voters that David Duke got last year (and if extrapolating to the whole country, is more than 10 million people). I suspect it’s a bit higher, plus a significant additional portion with “lean-racist” views (like, say, black men should stay away from their daughters, and they would rather send their kids to a private all-white school than a diverse public school) that don’t identify as racist or white supremacist but nonetheless have some similar goals.
I think they want a roll back of the Civil Rights Act – and with a friendly SCOTUS, they could get it. This would allow sundown towns to be legal again – white supremacists could form all-white enclaves, with businesses never serving black (or brown or gay etc.) people. I don’t think there would be thousands of such towns, but I think some would form. I think they want cops to be as brutal against black people as they were 50 and 75 years ago. A friendly justice department could aid this, and stop pursuing cases against departments and individual cops who violate civil rights. I think they want juries and prosecutors to be extra-friendly against white people who kill black people. I think they want to bomb black churches and kill interracial couples and generally do terrible and harmful things.
I don’t think they’re powerful enough to destroy America, but I think they might be dangerous enough to cause suffering to tens or hundreds of thousands or more, and set back progress in equal rights and equal opportunity for decades, and set back the possibility of black Americans and other minority Americans seeing the country as a truly welcoming place in which they’re actually fully equal citizens for even more decades. White supremacists were in charge of America for most of our history, and hurt America and Americans more than any other group – would it really be terribly shocking if a small but significant number remained and wanted to continue a truly terrible history of oppression and brutality, even on a smaller scale?
It may not be obvious to you, but your line of inquiry tends to run along the following predictable pattern:
NEWS: Police report a woman was forcibly dragged into the alley behind the bar and raped.
H-D: What was she wearing? Was she drunk? Where there witnesses?
It’s fortunate there are pics of the events in Charlottesville, or you’d be arguing it didn’t happen.
You’re claiming that you’re involvement was simply to fact check. Yet, what’s clear is that you’re not going out of your way to disparage them.
So, this is something you “don’t like” which is simply a throwaway comment to get on to your main point: a pedantic argument which many people has shown is morally questionable.
However – unsurprisingly – when it involves black people protesting, then the condemnation is clear and spontaneous:
My bolding.
Of course it’s despicable, and while you don’t seem eager to denounce them, Nazis white supremacists and other alt-right wing Trump supporters are also despicable. Had your argument simply been pedantic, I think it would have been different.
I have no idea what’s your motivation. If it’s support for the movement or Trump or whatever. However, it’s clear that you view it differently than you do others which you don’t feel bad about calling out.
What? It should be obvious that Hitler was a greater evil than the nuts on the left coast.
This is the second time this has happened in this thread. I (personally) am going to give it a pass once more…
…but I strongly suggest people double check from here on what topic they are in, because if it happens again in here, I will be giving a warning if I’m the first to see it (and my guess is, other mods will too) from here on.
DO NOT insult others outside of the Pit. Realizing it later and going “oops” is not a way you can get away with it (hence this note).
At this point, the thread should probably just be moved or closed. Other than the inadvertent Pit-style posts, most of the dialogue has moved well beyond MPSIMS-style reaction to breaking news.
The moral decay in this country just from the election of Trump is really striking. It’s especially striking that our resident conservatives are so loath to condemn Nazis. These guys are all over themselves to condemn BLM every time a couple of teenagers get into a slap fight at a BLM event, but when actual armed Nazis go on a murder spree, it’s all “hey, maybe these were the good Nazis”, and “Nazis marching in a right wing event in explicit support of Trump wasn’t really a political event”.
Guys, it’s OK to condemn Nazis, even if they’re on your side. In fact I should start a thread: “Dear Trump supporters, it’s OK to condemn Nazis.”
So who is supporting Nazism in this thread?
I’m on my phone right now, so It’s a PITA to cite or quote additional posts, but I’m fairly confident that one of my early posts used that exact same word - “despicable” - in reference to the Nazis. I’ve also sprinkled various condemnations throughout the thread. I don’t know how much more out of my way to disparage them I need to go, but I guess I get bored easily with ‘you’re not condemning them enough’ style of arguments.
This is pure, undiluted bullshit.
I’m not a trump supporter, but I think it’s especially important for conservatives, reactionaries, people sympathetic to ethnic nationalism and immigration skeptics to condemn the Nazis, the Traditionalist Worker’s Party, Richard Spence, the Identity Europa, neo-confederates, and all the other people who helped enact this rally, because these people are in a sense on their side (in the same sense that Mao was ‘on the side’ of more moderate communists, as much as they might despise him), and it’s especially necessary for all people to be clear about what the moral limits of their ideology are, how they know when a hard moral line has been crossed, and what they refuse to accept.
As one of the board’s more conservative posters, I’ll gladly mention that I condemn the scum who came to Charlottesville waving Confederate flags and talking up the KKK; I’ll gladly add that I protested them, live and in person, in Charlottesville.